Commonplace book

orig. A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.1578 COOPERThesaurus A studious yong man ... may gather to himselfe good furniture both of words and approved phrases ... and to make to his use as it were a common place booke. 1642 FULLERHoly & Prof. St. A Common-place-book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field.

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Monday, January 05, 2009

My reply to Andrew Seal has ignited a debate—although, to be fair, more of it has been conducted at Blographia Literaria than over here. Probably because of my well-known conservatism.

After telling his readers that he had visited my blog to reply to me, not too intemperately, he hoped, Seal said ruefully:

[I]f there’s any irony left in the canon wars, it’s that, despite the fulminations of conservatives about the neglect of Milton for Morrison, a liberal-minded kid like me could go through a contemporary English Department and come out feeling like what he really missed out on was contemporary literature from marginalized groups. I guess a liberal might say that I wasn’t all that brainwashed after all, and a conservative would say (as Myers does) that all I got out of it was white guilt. Given that I did get my Milton and some other great literature besides, I think the conservative view might be just a touch inaccurate.So that’s what I said. In truth, there is evidence that Seal got something more out of his literary education. Here are two things: (1.) the secure knowledge that conservatives oppose Milton to Morrison. And (2.) there is some such phenomenon as “contemporary literature from marginalized groups.”

Both these unfortunate ideas are the consequence of party-spiritedness in criticism. Two decades ago, when I was a new hire at Texas A&M University, already pigeonholed as a conservative because I had published essays and reviews in Commentary and the New Criterion, a public forum on the canon was arranged in the English department, and I was invited to represent one side. Trouble was, I did not view the debate over the canon as an either/or. I had published an essay in the Sewanee Review in which I argued that “the canon is a bogey, an invention of critics’ overfevered imaginations,” and that “the entire debate over the canon has been misconceived.” The various lists and bibliographies that have been mistakenly called canons, I tried to show, are arbitrary; they are selections without a larger principle; they are founded not on a distinction but on convenience. (I am perfectly aware that my own list of the best American fiction, 1968–1998, fits these requirements. No canonical listing can claim to be the final selection, because the very character of canonical-listing precludes finality. My list was intended as a convenience for those who might wish to begin reading the era’s fiction.)

I still believe much of my twenty-years-old argument, although I am sure that I would frame it far more devastatingly today. Not that it would make any difference. I was and am reputed to be a conservative. In the public forum at A&M, no matter how many times I repeated my claim that the canon is a monster hiding under the beds of terrified English professors, I was heard to be saying something like “How dare you neglect Milton for Toni Morrison!” (The irony only deepens. I have been guilty, in public, of confessing my uncompromising loathing for Milton. When I took a seminar on Milton in graduate school—one of the best classes I took—I sought refuge in a paper on the history of Milton criticism. Because I have also publicly argued that Philip Roth is the greatest American novelist since 1968, I have been accused, by an antagonist who wished to demonstrate my self-evident unfitness as a scholar, of neglecting Milton for Roth!) As a conservative, I am identified with positions and propositions that I have sternly repudiated, in print, with iron logic and soul-swaying rhetoric. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

Far more important than resolving to “diversify” our literary knowledge by reading more gays and women and men who are not white would be to rout the spirit of party in criticism altogether. And among other things, this would entail that critics bid farewell to the doctrine of “contemporary literature from marginalized groups.” Literature does not come from groups, marginalized or otherwise, but from individual men and women; and it is a product, not of the immutable racial and sexual identities they receive at birth, but of innumerable choices. Literature is a realm of freedom, including the freedom to dissociate yourself from antipathetic ideas, even those espoused by a group with which you otherwise identify.

4
comments:

Anonymous
said...

"Literature does not come from groups, marginalized or otherwise, but from individual men and women; and it is a product, not of the immutable racial and sexual identities they receive at birth, but of innumerable choices."

Er, I agree - but if only it was that easy to assume this viewpoint and to thus banish boundaries. Only the most supernatural amongst us are able to transcend some of these. Nobody can transcend them all.

The best reader of all is probably God, who can assess all viewpoints simultaneously and say what literature truly is, devoid of distinctions. But since nobody can do that, the danger lies in considering yourself so well-read that you think of yourself as God.

I am a latecomer to the debate, so will probably repeat points made by others. They seem to me to be deeply obvious:

1. If on given definitions of "greatness" and "masterpiece" you seem to wind up excluding utterances by large numbers of people with certain significant (I won't say "definitional") characteristics, including gender, race, religion, and philosophy, there is undoubtedly something wrong with your definitions.

2. There is something profoundly suspect about invoking some sort of objective standards to judge greatness and masterpieces, and then to come up with canons most of whose members share a significant characteristic (in this case, white maleness) with oneself.

3. "White male" is not a neutral default setting for humanity, and not even for the American population. So if one judges most greatness and masterpieces to be coming from what is, after all, a minority group itself, that raises a question, again, of loaded standards.

4. Despite the fact that multiculturalism ought at the least to have educated us all about our own blind spots, much Internet writing and blog writing does not take personal blind spots into consideration at all -- is not written in the spirit of "I may be blind to the merits of this, but educate me better so that I might see better." Professor Myers and others would do well to take a leaf from the great Henry Adams and admit that not only are their own educations not complete, they may not in some crucial respects have even begun yet. Intellectual humility is way lacking on the Web.

"If on given definitions of "greatness" and "masterpiece" you seem to wind up excluding utterances by large numbers of people with certain significant (I won't say "definitional") characteristics, including gender, race, religion, and philosophy, there is undoubtedly something wrong with your definitions."

A main difference between conservatives and liberals, its seems, is that liberals decide what they want the result to be and then devise criteria to deliver these outcomes, whereas conservatives decide on the criteria and and accept the results.

The latter approach seems more honest to me, in that you clearly state your premises up front. The former approach agrees to change the criteria if they don't like the outcome.

D. G. Myers

A critic and literary historian for nearly a quarter of a century at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, I am the author of The Elephants Teach and ex-fiction critic for Commentary. I have also written for Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. Here is the Commonplace Blog’s statement of principles, such as they are.